There was a funny question ("How to launch a missile?"), highly upvoded by the community, that was closed and almost reopened before I went to bed. I woke up today to the fact that it was wiped off the face of the planet. It still shows up in Google Cache, but now stack overflow won't show it to me. Did the mods decide to leave their sense of humor at home today and nuke it?

Did you sleep the entire day? That question was posted in the morning and deleted before noon!? If only I lived in another time zone I could sleep all day as well...
–
Jørn Schou-RodeApr 26 '10 at 21:48

1

I think i'm in a different time zone than you :)
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RCIXApr 27 '10 at 3:21

4 Answers
4

Yes, it was deleted by one of the mods (I'll let him speak up if he wants), and I congratulate him for it.

Frankly I find very few of these so-called "humor" questions funny at all. The fact that 82 people voted it up only proves that 82 Stack Overflow users would laugh at Bob Saget. Even if they are genuinely funny, they add no value to Stack Overflow as a Q&A site, so please don't complain when they get closed/deleted.

(Go ahead and downvote me for being a bitter old crank; I don't care, I'm leaving this post where it is.)

I'm not a 10K user (so I can't see the original/deleted), and I can't find it in Google's cache. (Though I do see it on search results.) The little text I have from Google reads:

I am working on an open-source missile
launcher application. ... The people
who closed this question should go
back and read the SO FAQ: "bring your
sense of ...

I'm going to guess that it was originally closed as "off topic." It may have also garnered offensive/spam votes.

The reality is that while a sense of humor is a good idea, it takes a lot to get something like that by the community. I'd have voted to shut it down in a heartbeat. It's obviously nothing but a noisy joke, and thus doesn't even provide much in the way of entertainment value to the community.

And before you mention other classic jokes on SO:

They are few and far between

Most are very old

The closest I can come to an example this "out there" is Boat Programming -- and that, too, was obliterated with extreme prejudice.

And boat programming was actually funny because it satirized the other off-topic questions. It helped people to see that they had to draw the line somewhere - a line which I think seems to be getting gradually forgotten...
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AarobotApr 26 '10 at 22:01

@Aarobot: I didn't say boat programming wasn't funny (I thought it was a riot), just that it was exterminated with extreme prejudice. :)
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John RudyApr 27 '10 at 2:41

I didn't say that you said it wasn't funny; it was meant as a comparison to the question in question.
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AarobotApr 27 '10 at 13:24

is only available to 10k+ users, because it was deleted by Marc Gravell, a moderator.

It was deleted because it wasn't really programming related, and while humorous, really wasn't an acceptable question for Stack Overflow. While funny questions are alright sometimes, the community generally discourages them.

He posted the following comment before deleting it:

Humour is one thing, but this simply isn't a sensible question. – Marc Gravell♦

If enough people want the question back, it can be undeleted by three users with over 10k reputation.